Lloyd Wright -Samuel Novarro House

The super-tight market seems to have created a little recent rash of priceupping, although this particular data point is pretty damn special: it's the 1928 Samuel-Novarro House, designed by Lloyd Wright and with a verry long list of celebrity inhabitants. (Plus it's in the Los Feliz's much-coveted Oaks neighborhood.) The Mayanesque house was built for Louis Samuel, Ben-Hur star Ramon Novarro's personal secretary (that's probably both with and without scare quotes, but who can say for certain?); after he found Samuel embezzling money, Novarro took over the house and expanded it, hiring legendary art director Cedric Gibbons to design interiors. Since the Novarro days, the house has been home to a number of musical theater types: composer Leonard Bernstein, theater director Jerome Robbins, and musical-comedy duo Betty Comden and Adolph Green. This is the house that gave actress Diane Keaton the historic preservation bug (she hired architect Josh Schweitzer to restore it). And actress Christina Ricci owned it for a year in the mid-aughts, selling its to its current owner in 2006 for $2.8275 million. It hit the market again in November 2011 asking $4.195 million; now it's back with a new price of $4.495 million. ÃÂ· 2255 Verde Oak Drive Los Angeles, CA [Estately] ÃÂ· Lloyd Wright's Celeb-Magnet Samuel-Novarro House in Los Feliz [Curbed LA]